Thermal and a Quarter Fight for Animal Rights

Rockin' the Indian music scene for over a decade, Bangalore rock band Thermal and a Quarter (TAAQ) is nothing less than brilliant. Cranking out their addictive brand of genre-defying, Steely Dan-inspired jazz-funk-fusion rock since 1996, today's TAAQ includes founding frontman Bruce Lee Mani, percussionist Rajeev Rajagopal and bassist Rzhude. Playing everywhere from the pubs of Glasgow and London to the "Not Just Jazzes of Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and New Delhi", to all the "coolest, hippest joints and some of the pearls of the boondocks" in between, TAAQ has also opened for classic rock acts Deep Purple and Jethro Tull.

With three awesome albums (Thermalandaquarter.com, Jupiter Café and Plan B), TAAQ has loads of hot songs including crowd-pulling favourites like "Sanity in Gravity", "Chainese Item", "Bend the World" and "Paper Puli" and newer numbers like "Chameleon", "Fly, "Holy Jose" and "How Can I Get Your Groove?" Honoured with a 2007 WorldSpace Award for Outstanding Contribution to Indian Rock, TAAQ is arguably one of the best (if not THE best) rock bands in India.

Recently, TAAQ's Bruce Lee Mani sat down with petaDishoom to talk shop about music, animal rights and what he thinks is a colonial hangover. Read on for more from this kind-hearted rocker:

Tell us something about Thermal and a Quarter.
Thermal and a Quarter celebrated its 11th anniversary in November 2007. It's hard to classify our music as a specific genre because it really spans everything from hard rock to Hindustani. Genre is usually something put on a CD cover so it can safely be placed in the right section of a music store – while we appreciate the value in that, we've always written music that seems hard to categorise.

Why do you think it's important to support animal protection?
It's important because animals have no voice. They can't stand up and protest such as we can.

What do you think you would do if you saw an animal who was being ill-treated?
I have come to the rescue of animals in the past, but I think addressing the issue on a larger scale would be a better solution than trying to remedy isolated incidents. When I say "a larger scale", I'm specifically talking about educating people.

Music is about expression. What do you have to say about animals imprisoned in cages, who cannot even engage in their most natural activities?
Again, people don't believe that animals deserve any better. It's an educational failure more than anything else, I think.

Do you think it is important to preserve wild animals' natural habitats? Why?
For a very long time now, people have indiscriminately, knowingly destroyed bits of an ecosystem we are only now beginning to comprehend. There was a feature in National Geographic magazine with a headline that read, "Can we save this fragile Earth?" Someone wrote in with a very valid point: it's not really the Earth that's fragile – it has time on its side. Sure, we can really screw it up, but give it a few million years and things will be all right again. What's really fragile is us. We endanger ourselves – and our children's children – each time we thoughtlessly damage our own ecosystem.

These days, tigers are endangered because they have been killed for their skins. Elephants are killed for their tusks for ivory. What do you have to say about the illegal trade in wild animal products?
We're happy that it is illegal. It's a different matter that the law has its own peculiar ways of dealing with what is illegal – especially in this country. We'll stop now, before we start discussing judicial reform!

How did you hear about PETA?
Everyone knows about PETA!

What would your message be to young people about protecting animals?
Animals are people too. They have a place in our lives, no matter how much we "urbanised" folk want to distance ourselves from the Earth, from growing things and from beings who give us so much. The day a 4-year-old says, “Milk? Oh, that comes from the supermarket!" we know we've really done wrong.

Back to music: what are your future plans?
As Umesh (a long-standing TAAQ roadie) once put it, TAAQ plans to be "present in the future!"

Want to help Bruce get the word out about cruelty to animals? Just send our "Change Everything" e-card to all your friends, and you'll be well on your way to educating the world about animal suffering.